God is greater than the highs and the lows

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

The design shows the phrase GOD IS GREATER above THAN THE HIGHS & THE LOWS in a clean sans-serif capital typeface. Between the lines are four angular black strokes forming a G shape, a chevron, a peak and a V. The artwork is solid black linework on a plain white background, with no shading.

Lettering Chevron Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourselves down, the lift's been dead since Tuesday, so you'll have to climb with me and listen on the way up. This is about Dolan Pryce, who minded the lift at Harrow Court back when the buttons were brass and the mirror still had somebody's initials scratched into it. Dolan never sat down on shift. He said a man who sits in a lift forgets which way is up.

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Fourteen floors, sixty-two residents, and a cable that groaned like a cow in a wet field. Every morning Dolan rode up to the roof to check the pulley, then down for the post, then up again for the nurse on six who carried her pills in a carrier bag. He kept a tally in the lining of his cap, little pencil strokes in rows. Highs and lows, he called them. A good day was a run of ups. A bad day was the dip to the basement where the bins sat, and you had to go down before you could come back up.

The winter the power went funny, the lift stuck between nine and ten for most of a night. A girl called Ruth was inside with her mother's shopping and a baby that wouldn't stop crying. Dolan talked them through it from the shaft ladder with a torch clamped in his teeth. When he ran out of things to say, he sang the hymn his gran used to hum over the washing, the one about being greater than the dark, because it was the only words he had left. Ruth said later that the baby stopped first, then she did. The doors shuddered open at ten past four, and the mother said he'd saved them. Dolan said it was only the cable, and went back to his tally.

They replaced the mirror years after, and the new one came without names on it. But on the wall beside the button panel, somebody had pencilled a row of peaks and valleys, and nobody ever had the heart to paint over them. If you look closely when you're waiting for the doors, you'll still see them under the cream gloss. Now mind your heads, the ceiling's lower than it was.